Strategic Planning for Archival Institutions in Palestine The Case of Palestine National Archives Center رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

This thesis highlights the importance of the Palestinian National Archive to stakeholders with various intellectual and cultural orientations and various institutional goals, whereby the generality characterizing the concept of archives, and the concept’s interrelatedness among sectors including culture, education, and governance in the public sector; produces an arena for strategic forces and trajectories that have all failed to establish a Palestinian national archive as an inclusive national institution.

This thesis presents a longitudinal case study of strategic planning operations at the Palestinian National Archives Center, by describing the transformations of the Palestinian Archive in important historical joints that include the post-Oslo stages through the second intifada and the division between the Fatah and Hamas. This thesis builds a description of the mutual effects between these events, their accumulation and their subsequent formation of the National Archive Center’s strategic framework, the common environment between archival institutions, their organizational culture, and various strategic directions of stakeholders.

This research goes beyond analyzing the environment to draw conclusions about the reasons for the failure of the National Archives Center’s strategic endeavors, which are represented by several reasons, including institutionally inherited structural weakness, the Center’s failure to bring about strategic change and its failure to create a strategy for stakeholder management.

The researcher adopted a pragmatic perspective on the study of this case, relying on the philosophy of Callon and Latour on the sociology of translation, which enriches the details of the case under study, where this relative perspective depends on the flattening of relations between

entities that include the plans of the National Archives Center, the goals of stakeholders, the

particulars of archives and the political and cultural intermediaries; all of which swarm towards a moving goal ,and make formulations that leave traces of patterns for the strategic interventions taking place. Consequently, the strength of the data collected through the triangulation method and the multiplicity of information sources had the ability to produce an accurate description of the relationships between these entities that formed through its movement the most important joints of the Palestinian National Archives Center strategies. This methodological movement was framed with a conceptual framework developed from the deliberate and emerging strategic model of Mintzberg and Waters.

The research presents lessons learned from the experience of the Palestinian National Archives Center in the form of recommendations for strategic planners, archive policy makers and decision-makers in this arena today. These recommendations include the adoption of a comprehensive national archive concept that takes into account the whole spectrum of various archival institutions’ goals, and calls for enabling the category of marginalized archivists. In addition, the research calls to consider the Israeli occupation as a threat that can be overcome. The research also affirms the need to take into account alternative scenarios in the planning process, especially with regard to the administrative and legislative division between the West

Bank and Gaza Strip.